A New Era: Trump’s Impact on Crypto and Innovation in the U.S.

Transcript

we are tracking like we are not off track and like frankly all of the stupid ideas in 2017 that or most of them people thought were stupid you know like even nfcs or defi or games like all of these things are coming true like it it just is taking a little bit so I think you can either myopically focus on like oh it's such a bubble and blah blah blah it's like you're welcome to short I don't know what the be case is but like you can knock yourself out I think you're kind of missing the force for the if that's your perspective hey everyone this episode is brought to you by say the Blazing fast parallelized blockchain which is unlocking salonik performance for the vast ocean of eth devs out there now you're going to be hearing all about

say and their new V2 upgrade but if you take away one thing evm is here to stay there are some problems with it which we're going to get into later in the episode but say and especially their V2 upgrade is helping solve that so thank you very much say for making this episode possible all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer The View expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-host are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode all right everyone welcome back to another Roundup edition of bcro if

you got Michaels one and two Vance fellas miss you guys last week how you doing doing well we're doing well you know thing new news news at some point but you know we're we're cooking yeah it's been a uh one of the more eventful weeks in both crypto but also just I would say modern political life in the last uh last last week um pretty nuts man pretty nuts uh but before we get into the Trump stuff actually I just want to I want to give a shout out to uh moring some I was at ECC last week got some Li swag on on here nice merch yeah it's really good merch yeah I was actually supposed to be

delivering this to someone else but I I uh I overslept and didn't end up delivering this so you know who you are who's this is supposed to be so thank you um it's in it's in the mail it's in the mail yeah exactly it's in the mail but um yeah there was uh honestly ECC was uh it was I know you guys um you guys didn't make you'll definitely At Con next year but yeah overall Brussels was like I mean as far as cities go you know definitely better than most American cities maybe not as great as many European cities um but it was great like I saw a bunch of people that I you know know and like and stuff like I learned some stuff but it felt very like spread out and fragmented this year it was a

little bit tough to get a sense of like what was going on and who was doing what but I think in KH next year it's going to be a little bit more it's not quite as big of a city it's a little bit more concentrated so I think khor is going to be sick um I mean look this is how we fix you know these conferences is like you know no one shows up to the side events so we put more emphasis on the main event and the programming so I think it's like I think it's fine I'm excited for Tom you know pull up pull up sou of France I love that of course maybe in a boat maybe in a boat maybe a reasonably sized reasonably sized boat we don't know reasonably sized boat yeah exactly is my point you know who you

know who made a surprise appearance back to ECC who I didn't see myself but I saw pictures was suzu I heard yacht you know yeah he was at I I think I saw him at raave uh that's where that's where I saw hard to believe shout out Suz yeah anyway uh shout out Sue all right let's get into the uh so uh you know we're recording this on the 18th and just days ago on the 13th there was uh the first assassination attempt on a us um former president in the last I think since Ronald Reagan uh back in 40 years 40 years yeah um it was it was pretty

surreal to watch I don't know where you guys were when all this was happening I was just I was like I was my last night of ECC I was like all right I'm calling this one early I got an early flight out tomorrow and I was scrolling Twitter I started to see these messages come up ended up staying up to like 400 a.m. just reading everything uh slept like one hour but yeah it was pretty crazy he was he was doing a rally in um uh Pennsylvania um in one of these sort of crucial swing areas you know he was pointing to uh he was doing a talk about immigration and turned and pointed to something that was on the board and a couple of bullets whizzed by and just scraped his ear you know I'm editorializing I'm sure no one listening to this podcast hasn't seen this I think

it's crazy how little it missed him by but yeah what was your guys just I guess like human response to to all of this before we unpack the cryptone market side well I was in the middle of Glacier National Park backpacking in Montana service oh my God so I caught up with everything on Sunday wow kind of it was actually kind of nice you just got to like speedrun the whole thing you're like okay I don't have to worry about like what happens next Trump's okay like the whole thing we didn't descend into Anarchy I mean you talked about it Mike but like the the three-dimensional representations of the head turn relative to where the

bullet Arc uh I mean milliseconds centimeters it's not even like feet and inches at this point we're talking about um some pretty crazy stuff so I don't know um you know divine intervention luck and happen stance uh this kind of indistinguishable between the two um just in terms terms of you know the time the place uh the series of events but it was uh it's pretty crazy to like come out of the woods and be like oh wow that happened this must be a joke oh wait no it's not a joke yeah I mean I feel like we've had so much political commentary on like the shooting and the aftermath and the uh you know the meaning of all

of it to me I mean I think like we really put and we went to the absolute brink of you know where country could potentially go into a civil war type scenario and I think that is uh whether you're Pro or anti-trump I think you can kind of see that pretty clearly and it feels like now at least on the Republican side there's Unity but it feels like there's also more Democrats becoming Republicans just as a result of you know maybe it's the policies maybe it's the pick but like the physicality of the shooting is pretty wild like the bullet missed him by a millimeter and you know I I think like what is the what is the most simple explanation for this people throw out like it's an act of God you know there's

there's all these potential maybe it just you know it happened and there was no divine intervention but like I don't know personally it's hard to believe that this is uh like a bullet could miss him by that amount it's just crazy to me like it like it feels like we are like one one idea I've kind of thought through is like this idea of like timeline leap where where like you know post shooting we're we're just on a different timeline caused by God caused by whoever runs a simulation whatever but like it feels like we're in a very different place right now and I found that people post the shooting have have started to become more interested in religion which is pretty interesting I think that's a symptom of people dealing

with this like timeline leap so no matter what what you kind of used to explain it I think it's impossible to deny that we're just in a fundamentally different place than we were you know a Saturday politically economically spiritually whatever that might be a little bit out there but you know I think that's true there's a there's a really good I mean it's actually an okay movie but it's like uh Matt Damon um I think Emily blunts in it The Adjustment Bureau and the whole point is there's these maps and there's these facilitators of the maps and the maps kind of lead people down their path or lead people in the direction there's still some chance for like choice and you can send people down a different like there's and there's this moment in

the movie where they're looking at the book and and The Adjustment Bureau is is saying like the map has completely changed I I felt like that is the exact kind of way that my my head went to what has happened and how you know the future looks relative to where the past was and a couple of things that I think you know lead us in this direction I think we now have a chance for from a a bipartisan perspective for for unification and I think that that is a lot at least that's the rumors and we have't I think today is when Trump is giving his speech at the RNC but apparently that is the new message from his um speech which he'll deliver later today is is unification um I think that there's an opportunity to

pull in people uh who previously were on the fence and and kind of make it a more clear-cut example um but I think it also negates a lot of the arguments um that you saw from the Democrats on inciting violence um you know trying to trying to um push one side versus the other like th this is fundamentally like the worst case scenario it hasn't happened in 40 years um and we survived um quite literally um as as a you know institution as a two-party system as a government and um I I could definitely have seen you know one of the paths going a different direction I agree um but yeah feeling happy and and you know on the right path I think the other really big piece of

news that came out of this in addition um not come out of this in particular but that came out since is the appointment of JD Vance as the running mate and uh I think that you know obviously something that we can talk about here but um it feels like not calling off the RNC or delaying it keeping every all the trains running on track on the same timeline um and putting someone forward who's younger he's 39 uh who's more forward thinking he's he's Pro Innovation comes from silic Valley and and I think has a lot of potential for you know what the future holds um not only of the Republican party but but what you know at least in the betting ODS what the next government of the United States

will look like uh before we get into JD Vance I just wanted to like the the historical comparisons here just to set uh maybe level set for folks just how serious this was and like the bullet that we dodged here is um one I actually I've showed this podcast a million times but I'm listening to this podcast called the rest his history they're doing they're like six episodes into the assassination of France Ferdinand um and they talk about like Gabriel princep and how like this sort of radicalization Journey that he went through and what happened in the days after the assassination how it all happened and how it led to this crazy war and I just feel like it was a powder cake ready to blow is like the the description that

was used to describe what happened you know in in the Balkans uh that led to World War I right and I think you could actually make a really strong argument that today is even more politically charged than it was back then because there there were these smaller sort of was like Serbia and and and austrial Hungary they weren't really happy but like the major Powers it wasn't even really a huge powder cake it was this weird like web of allegiances that everyone ended up getting drawn in and anyway like regardless of your political allegiances regardless of just the hum Humanity of not wanting someone to get assassinated I just think we should all acknowledge that we avoided much worse you know whatever version of the simulation it could have gotten very bad um and in terms of Ronald Reagan I think

another interesting historical parallel to point out is uh so when Reagan the assassination attempt actually happened the two similarities are one I think he actually got an 8% bump in the polls which is almost exactly what the poly Market odds showed for Trump was which is pretty crazy and then what happened in the Electoral College that year I actually don't remember what you won 49 states yeah yeah yeah so and and you know and the theme there that we're seeing start to emerge that you guys were both just getting at is Unity uh there's a great quote actually when Reagan actually got shot and he went into his surgeon and he asks the surgeon you know are you a Republican sir and the and the surgeon goes today sir we are all Republicans just a great like American history kind

of quote but Unity dude Trump is is the second coming of of Ronald Reagan and their campaign slogans we've talked about this are identical you know Reagan started make America great again and Reagan beat Jimmy Carter as we' talked about who was basically a carbon copy of Joe Biden like like it's all lining up for this and you look at what the stock market did in the 80s under Reagan that was the go- go time of lbos and you know it was the start of the tech boom in some ways with PCS and I think just like taking a step back of like how do people explain what happened here like I I don't I just don't think it's possible to just be like yeah just

like the bullet missed him like you kind of need to be open to like Signs even if you're not religious of like look like we got right to the brink and everyone saw what it could look like and now we're back and like it feels like the us is going to have this probably unified house senate and presidency you know a dismantling of a lot of you know the the red tape and bureaucratic overreach and it's yeah it's just really good for the country and I I think people are believing that and even the guy like I'm I'm extending my lawn right now you know he's the guy's uh in the uh in the [ __ ] cab of this this thing like you know bulldozing stuff and you know stopped stopped me and we talked

about it and he's like yeah I didn't believe in God before but like I believe now it's like people are really taking this pretty seriously which is which is great I feel like we've just been in this like malaise of not believing in anything for so long and and that's changed I wonder if there's a bit of a yeah people like the ISM thing here is definitely very strong and I wonder if there's a little bit of a push back natural push back to like some of these big trends about um you know individualism like extreme individualism uh atheism that type of thing it seems like there's a there's a counter push in the other direction I I want to get a sense from you guys of there's been some so obviously Trump's had some pretty high-profile supporters for a while but recently like Mark andrees um and Ben

Horowitz came out and said they were supporting uh Trump and there was actually pretty a great interview if people haven't listened to it the first 30 minutes are not only just uh a reasoning as to why uh but also they dive really deep into why blockchain I'm I'm really I've sent that to a number of people who aren't in the industry as a great kind of description as to why politics matter in this instance uh for the US and and for us Innovation and why Innovation is important but the first subject they talked about is blockchain it's like the first 35ish minutes no kidding all right I will that out I I've actually had the the challenge of uh like my physical therapist actually asked me like why

does the regulation stuff have anything to do with crypto and I had a really hard time articulating it yeah okay all right um all right I wanted to get your guys take maybe bring this a little bit back to more markets here so Mark cubin tweeted something out um and it's a semi lengthy tweet here so I'll just read it or actually just show my screen um so everyone can see but I wanted to get your guys take on this um and I know Santi and J were talking about this as well um on Empire today but um the Tweet is uh part one here's a contrary opinion on the emergence of Silicon Valley support for president Trump which like all my opinions on here probably won't be popular it's a Bitcoin play not because the former president is a far stronger proponent of crypto that's nice

but doesn't really impact the price of crypto it makes it easier to operate a crypto business because the inevitable and required changes of the SEC what will'll Drive the price of Bitcoin is lower tax rates and tariffs which if history is any guide and it's not always will be inflationary combine that with the global un certainty as the geopolitical role of the USA and the impact of the US dollar as a reserve currency and you can't align the Stars any better for bitcoin price acceleration how high can the price go way higher than you think remember the market for Bitcoin is global and the supply has a final limit of 21 million Bitcoin with unlimited fractionalization all right all right cool cool so what do you guys what do you guys think about this like uh I mean this is this is classic Mark Cuban

taking a concept uh constru in a way that fits his narrative and he's also missing the the total Point like Bitcoin is legal in the US this isn't something that that Donald Trump is going to come in and like we have created bitcoin and it is now built in the U that what he really should have said is web 3 or crypto r large yeah and and that that I also don't think is something that you know this whole Silicon Valley um uh Bastion uh of you know money and power is really the thing that's driving this if anything the people that are donating money Elon Musk you know all all the PE like if you break down where the money is coming from Mark Andre and Ben Horowitz I don't know how much they're

donated they haven't disclosed they're obviously Pro crypto they're also very Pro Silicon Valley Pro American dynamism and very Pro AI like the the relative value for them is probably like in terms of dollars that they are managing is probably like four to five times AI versus crypto Elon musk I mean other than his like flirting around with Dogecoin and like he doesn't really care about crypto as much as he does Ai and so it's this whole kind of like the reason why people are supporting him is probably because it'll be a more friendly environment for innovation in general it's not particularly Bitcoin and I saw I think the Washington Post put an article out basically saying like

the thing that's driving Donald Trump right now is all the money that's flowing from from crypto donors it's like no like you know the the most profitable fundraiser that he had was hosted by David Sachs from Craft Ventures and you know the attendees yes the win boss Twins were there they tried to donate money apparently they they like infringed on pack rules and had to take the money back the next day and so like they have like you know it's like the the money that was raised was not from crypto people like it it has been from people who are much wealthier than crypto people which frankly are the ones who are doing after AI right now the the things I also other than that stuff disagree with from that Mark Cuban

post is like if we're cutting Bas if we're cutting interest rates 25 basis points a quarter we're not going to re ignite inflation like that's just a dumb take cutting taxes won't reignite inflation either like the the co inflation was supply chain inflation driven initially by just basically the supply chain globally being halted and then them printing money in the stock market going like totally different scenario not going to happen again um but I do think the essence of the post is correct where like maybe to coin it now like if the last kind of cycle meme was like super cycle I think this one is timeline leap like we're we're just in a fundamentally different place

where like you know even right now Trump announced that there's going to be a Bitcoin strategic Reserve like we're we are not in Kansas anymore this this is a different timeline and and what does that mean we've always been pretty consistent like in our lifetimes Bitcoin to a million 100% does it happen in 20 years I think that was the prior timeline I think the the new timeline is accelerated um more for crypto more unified um the only thing that concerns me with Trump at the moment is like he's making promises to a lot of people is it possible to keep all of them at the same time I think you can keep promises to crypto and Tech um but like there's going to be a lot of other Industries that are angling for

you know favor in some way shape or form and you know even in 2016 he promised the coal miners you know he was going to bring back coal mining Co mining is not coming back you know for anybody um and so like there's going to be winners and losers here I think a lot of people are now in the Trump camp but I think the important thing is that you're not on the losing side you know like him calling out Mar Mark Zuckerberg by name in that tweet the yesterday I mean bro you got to pivot Mark Mark Zuckerberg needs to Pivot because you know he's coming he's coming for you uh and that's going to be material to the stock price if it continues hey everyone wanted to give a big shout out to today's title sponsor SE now I want to talk to you guys a

little bit about why I think SE is cool from a design standpoint a big problem that it solves for E theevs out there and then some cool stuff that se has coming up the reason I like say from an architecture perspective is again it's a very fast blockchain parallelization all of that stuff but say has essentially been custom building block space which is for Consumer apps indexes now they have some very cool features which enable that so twin turbo consensus optimistic parallelization say DB all of this stuff allows you to reduce the time to finality make for very very fast transaction so if you're building a consumer app or a DEX this is basically the blockchain for you if you've been building in the evm you love the evm but there are some restrictions about it that don't support your app so maybe you can't do fast enough transactions or

it's not parallelized whatever it is you can now take all that stuff that you built you don't have to start from scratch and you can build it on say now recently they've launched V2 but also public Dev net so the way that you can follow that and keep up to date is go and follow say Network on Twitter all right thanks guys I got another question for you guys it's been uh Loosely floated right about the idea of Jamie Diamond being treasury secretary um I don't know how possible that actually is take that job he would never he I mean maybe he will but let's just put it this way he has more power in his current job yeah much all right that's a okay and probably the pay is a little bit better too okay yeah here here's okay so let's just say let's like wave that aside and

just as like purely as hypothetical do you think it would be good um I guess from the standpoint of crypto as an industry to have Jamie Diamond because on the one hand he honestly he's a successful guy he's very smart right like I think people really deeply respect him on the other hand it's not like he's been super supportive of basically everything that he said about Bitcoin and crypto has been pretty negative over although he does have a 200 person team at his at his company he's always sort of spoken out of two amounts it's um it's all two sides um it's all two faces I think for him the data really just runs the opposite direction of what he is saying which is that the this so far has been the most successful ETF launch in history and we have another one coming up on Tuesday

and we are you know probably looking at a massive investment cycle not not anything similar to the investment cycle that we saw with AI and the development of of that IND of the last few years but we are going to see a financial services driven investment cycle into token tokenization r large and that I think is something that he kind of recognizes maybe or and and maybe he's gonna like go back and play revisionist history and be like oh I was just talking about Bitcoin as like a new currency same thing look these guys are welcome to change their mind right even Trump even Trump there's an article this morning he said I was about to ban Bitcoin in in 2020 or or or 2017 2018 one of those

years um and and he was like then I talked to people and I was like no I changed my mind I mean people are allowed to change their minds and change their perspectives as they see progress like that that is how we have progress in the first place and like we we have the solid what we didn't have before is like and and I guess last when Trump was President last time it was unclear what Maga was about Beyond this blue collar revitalization um but now it's like this more Tech forward party and that's some of the ideological base and certainly funding sources and so like people are allowed to change their mind in the context of you know the president having a pretty

set economic agenda that is Tech forward because like what what what like what's the point of being anti- that and like this all kind of comes down to you know JD Vance now and I think Trump was Trump is going to be president obviously in the figurehead and the you know commander-in-chief but JD JD Vance is probably going to be like the policy Center um and having him as the pick like it it it just doesn't get any better than that well and and just to put a finer tooth on that um as an example we saw what happened with the fit bill it went through the house and its current you know implementation or current um draft bipartisan support 71 Democrats almost all Republicans voted

for it now it goes to the Senate the process in the Senate is is there are a couple of drafts that are going to be the canonical Senate drafts JD Vance is the author of what is thought to be the leading Senate draft on crypto Market structure yep think about that like the person who is going to put their name behind something is is also and you know it's kind of implied that whoever toan this point it's kind of implied the president runs the country um and the and the vice president is kind of the head of the Congress and policy comes from Congress so it's sort of head of policy um and that I think is a pretty strong vote that you know pro-innovation Pro crypto is exactly what you get uh

from a younger candidate like JD Vans I've got a question for you guys how do you see because the the criticism right on and maybe alluding a little bit to can uh can or Will trump keep his promises to everyone you know people that are less supportive of this Administration or Trump as a guy or whatever say hey he's just saying this to you and then he's going to get in and do whatever um what do you guys think would be like let's just say Trump ends up getting elected with JD Vance as his VP you know what would you be hopeful to see in terms of actual like legislation or change um for like the us-based crypto industry Market structure Bill Market structure yeah Market structure Bill like it's very easy to keep promises to

crypto it's very hard to keep promises to a to an industry like coal mining back in the day um where where where in particular the economics are not on your fa in your favor right and like to get it so if you haven't read hillbill YY or or watch the movie it's pretty good um a lot of JD Vance's economic ideas are effectively the dollar strength uh and you know product Surplus dumping in the US has made economic exports from the US non-competitive and so one of the strategies that he has to bring jobs back to the us and this is all in the context of like how do you keep promises to like the rustbell well you onshore

things you have to weaken the dollar you literally you cannot make things cost competitively in the US if you do not weaken the dollar and you know that that's part of it obviously and on the other side you know Trump is saying we want to keep the dollar as the reserve currency which like you know I think both of those ideas are compatible and so like how do you do that well one idea is um you you you know intentionally dro the value of the dollar relative to other countries part of that is cutting interest rates aggressively and then how do you keep it as the reserve currency you distribute the dollar more widely than it ever has been and frankly that is stable coins and so like I view the economic agenda of revitalizing you know the Rust Belt

and the Midwest via devaluing the dollar as kind of needing crypto to keep it as the reserve currency in terms of Distributing it more widely so I I think he can keep promises to most people I think where you're going to see a lot of uh you know hey you said X and then you did y um or just like frankly like keeping promises doesn't doesn't work from like a free market standpoint is in places like energy where it's like okay cool we're going to drill more oil okay everyone's drilling more oil okay the price is lower lower okay we're gonna you know get more Knack gas okay the price of knack gas is now lower like they're gonna have to kind of fight among themselves but I view the winners of this Economic Policy as being crypto Tech

know Rust Belt jobs um and yeah I think it's possible to keep all promises so here here's a question if not and I don't I know he wasn't ever really considered seriously but like who who do you think would have been you know the next most um Forward Thinking in terms of crypto regulation like out of all the VP candidates or all the even potential presidential candidates like you know out of everybody that we've talked to you know you've got JD Vance you got Trump like what would you say is probably other one I'd say VC I was a little I mean I think Doug bergham is probably Pro crypto but I think he is frankly less concerned with crypto than he is with

Nack gas which is the industry he came from so so with with that um v i I would agree I mean V has been at least the the rumors have been he's been kind of helping steer the Trump campaign into crypto as he saw some of the stuff happen with the nft event he saw some you know he he's basically the one who's helping to liaz with crypto industry in in a lot of ways so here's a little insight um VC is being um uh well at Yale V's one of V's best friends was JD Vance of course Chad and one of J JD Vance is one of his children is named

VC I I believe there's something to the effect of JD Vance's wife also helped facilitate VC meeting his wife um and it's now rumored that VC will be the person that takes over in JD Vance instead as senator of Ohio and so if you if you think about all of the sort of combinatorial effects of okay obviously they're close obviously they they are aligned you know politically and with different with their perspectives on Innovation there's going to be a lot of collaboration and I think there's going to be a lot of ability to collaborate if a situation like that happens and I know V has been also talked about as like having a cabinet position or you know how will he be I think he'll be involved

I think he doesn't have to have like an official position to have influence though um so it's going back to the whole how do we make sure that this stuff continues forward and how do you keep promises to these industries it's about getting votes and if you put people in positions where you can have those votes who have the same perspectives as you it's helpful so speaking of JD Vance he has this he put his finger on have you guys do you guys know um this guy Sir James Goldsmith he was this British industrialist from a while ago he gave a really influential interview on Charlie Rose where they were talking about inducting China into the World Trade Organization back in the 90s I I'll look it I'll send it to you guys it's like nine minutes uh to watch and it's like

really worth your time he's arguing with this he's basically describing if you move these lowcost labor pools into a trade uh agreement with more developed Nations everyone's just going to Outsource their labor to China or wherever and like the the middle class of developed countries are going to suffer and there's this other the there's someone on the other side who says no no no that's very you know small-minded of you it's actually G to increase exports from the United States to these other countries and anyway this guy just it's like is very pressant uh sort of interview that this guy gave a while ago and it seems like that's what JD Vance is really honed in on he's like I want wages for for workingclass people in the United States to go up that's it

it seem and and that's actually against the Republican Orthodoxy of um like older generations of Republicans as well which is I think that'll be basically what it looks like is the political parties in the US are reforming um in real time I think the Republicans are doing it first and the Democrats are probably going to have to do it because you know as all this stuff is happening with Trump and JD Vance what's going on with Biden I mean I I think um who I just saw someone it looks like he's actually going to drop out now I think the polym market odds are back at 75% um was it Adam Schiff who called for his Adam Schiff called for it um the apparently there has been a lot of infighting within the White House and now uh kamla's um staffers are like

yelling at Biden staffers like it's time to move over it's a complete [ __ ] show uh there they're also is a report um out this morning that talks about how Josh airo is who the Democrat donors want to run with kamalo and he he's he's a strong person I mean he's he's the governor of uh Pennsylvania um I think he would be you know it's sort of like him greton Whitmer but I think one of the funniest things that happened this this was just classic political trolling um the Trump campaign when asked about when uh they wanted to schedule the VP debate they said um it's too early for us to tell um

we don't want to until until there's a candidate named we really don't want to um you know disenfranchise you know Whitmer Shapiro Nome whoever may be that's running with comma Harris I mean just classic trolling the reporting now is like you know Camala is like trying to pick like Josh Shapiro's the governor of Pennsylvania to be her VP if I'm Josh air I'm like I am I'm not what you think I'm [ __ ] leaving this job to you know get in the clown car with you and lose by Trump lose to Trump by like 30 points like I'm gonna wait till 2028 I I think she's literally gonna have to pick like Pete budeg or something like that mayor

Pete and Kamala just it's gonna be I think the Democrats are like trying to do the right thing where you can't Gaslight your party and tell people that they're not seeing what they're seeing on TV like in terms of Biden just being basically a corpse but like they're about to jump into a whole other area like Kamal is not a strong candidate at all she she isn't but basically at this point at least in the initial polls that have been coming through anyone is polling better than Biden Harris right now yes yes but like it's like when

people were like like do you want to vote for RFK and then it was like Wow 20% of people want to vote for RFK he's down to like three or 4% now it's it's the same thing with like issue polling where where it's like you'll pull people and be like uh do you support uh Israel defending its territory people be like yes and people be like do you support uh you know Palestinians in their struggle for Freedom people be like yes it's like issue polling and hypothetical candidates are like the worst way Cala I'm I'm calling it if they run Kamala they're going to lose by more than 15 points and in the popular vote they're going to get I'm I'm just calling the polls as I see them I don't disagree no no I mean I think uh we just need to see more polling but like people who are

bullish MAA I think need to have their head inspected I mean here here's the other part too it's like okay the the the party that is running for pro-democracy against anti-democracy is going to subvert the Democratic process to choose candidates outside of said Democratic process proc so is isn't one of the challenges though for Cala is that all that money that they fundraised for the campaign that can no she can have it she gets it she gets it right but if they run someone else who isn't Kamala they don't get it correct like dude it's gonna be Cala you cannot you cannot basically it's like kamala's out there going all these rallies her names on all the posters you she like running the campaign you can't have someone else be

like hey it's Cala it's like you know time to step aside you know let the big dogs here also Al also like you you send back a quarter of a billion dollars how much of that comes back to the next person yeah there's some breakoff there maybe what's the reup rate probably that's what I mean maybe 25% something like that no it's it's a lot higher than that because you get super packs I mean I would guess it's probably like 75 80% but a lot of that money is individuals and individuals be like cool thanks for my like 500 bucks back I'm not going to send this again all right um how much do you guys think that that in this in this we're really waiting away from crypto here but how much you think if this is like ego driven right this has got to be for for

everyone involved I mean even of course Biden got snubbed in 88 he also got passed over in 2016 when he was the VP then and was like nah Hillary's Gonna Take Take a Shot here like he's been passed over multiple times and he remembers and and so does Joe maybe maybe he doesn't remember but other people in his family do dude I you know who I always think about when I when I see Biden get on TV and call himself the first black female vice president or whatever is I think about the comms director that was coaching him right before he got on and just thinking like Joe here's what you got to say here your talking points man just stick to this and then he says that and it's like

oh no we have we have live footage we have live footage of that reaction it's Anthony blinkin every time he speaks oh really oh God I mean have you seen this the security where where he is giving a speech in front of G and he calls him a dictator oh my God I didn't but I saw him call zinski Putin and it's like and that reaction as well it was like yeah yeah um well you know Trump's gonna be speaking at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville in I guess is that a week away so not that not that far away um I'll be interested to see what he says

but look I once again I don't I don't think um I don't think Trump himself is like super knowledgeable about crypto like just in the same way that I don't think you know in the 90s Clinton was super knowledgeable about the internet I think they just understand that these are powerful forces and these are Innovation centers and he's going to talk about how he doesn't want you know people are telling me Oh I need to do this he like yesterday he's like yeah I'm hearing that I need to do a an nft drop people want another nft drop it's like he they do correct uh but I I think brole you know he he's he's not going to be the one who's like here's how we're gonna you know build this thing better and do it here and he's not gonna be

that person but he's just gonna he's gonna chart a path forward to be able to enable the people who know what they're talking about to do it so I I don't think he's gonna you know just his presence there is what matters it's not what he says let's let's talk a little bit about the market reaction to all of this so it's been a pretty good week for Bitcoin and crypto markets generally I think we're sitting at just under 2.5 trillion in total market cap and Bitcoins ranging around 65k somewhere somewhere there um and there are a couple explanations for this I think that this uh everything that's going on in politics and Trump probably is starting to move markets people are calling this the Trump trade uh but then also we we have since found out what we suspected and I think we're

talking about um which was was Germany was selling an enormous amount of their Bitcoin uh they sold something like 50,000 Bitcoin and uh I got a shout out um Andy conston who's a big fin twick guy who who I appreciate a lot and he tweeted something out he was like it's only bad execution for Germany if the price retraces uh steeply next week and it was like yep turns out turns out it it hor it turns out it did uh it was horrible execution so there's maybe two things going on at the same time my favorite point just on that is uh German came out with a press release and and said that they they sold it in as Market a favorable manner as as as could be found or something and it was like guys you just Market sold and everybody followed you and watched you make those

moves yeah it's like otc's I saw I saw there was something about like a very like obscure law in Germany where if you hold some asset and it's you know X volatility or something like that they who knows um anyway they decided to sell this enorm and that explains a lot of the pretty negative um you know price action for for Bitcoin but what do you guys think about I mean when does the market start pricing in um like a trump presidency and you know people are calling this the Trump trade and I guess in in one sense you could say well if everyone knows it and already expects it to be good could already be getting priced in so how do you just view all like the market conditions relative to this news yeah look I think it's becoming more obvious

I think you can start to see things like poly Market uh and the odds of the you know next president presidency um starting to actually drive markets and you start to see some of these positive movements actually drive crypto like we saw the last couple of days there's just a lot of things going on at the same time like the two-thirds of the mount Gods Bitcoin has been distributed to the platforms that will then distribute to the creditors and that's supposed to happen before end of August so I think or at least through Kraken which is about a third it'll it'll uh be distributed to creditors end of August so like there there definitely is some Supply overhangs I'd say in the like short term in the next couple of weeks um but at the same time we've got eth ETF supposedly launching next Tuesday

and and we got all the prices yesterday I I think there's you know some interesting tidbits also like interesting facts that there aren't differences between you know the some of the pricing structures that we saw with the Bitcoin ETFs um so there's a lot of lot of stuff going on I would also say um macro will also start to take over as well so the the Trump trade is not just a crypto trade I think the Trump trade is also a pro- inovation but also lower interest rates as we talked about um you know the dollar effects as we talked about um there's just going to be a a probably a CA change towards risk assets the other thing that happened last week is um money markets hit the most amount of AUM that we've seen since the rate

hiking cycle and I think it's was either 14 or 15 trillion dollars of cash just sitting there um and it's not really something that you see a 25 basis rate cut and you're like oh instead of earning 5.1% now I'm earning 4.9% like okay it's time to get this whole thing out of there but slowly but surely you start to see the E like that the Seesaw start to flip where it's like oh I'm earning five 5% of my money market okay like Risk assets start to appreciate people expect risk assets to to appreciate once you have the rate uh interest rate cutting cycle start because you don't expect it to end uh or at least go to the to the rstar rate which is probably going to be around 3

and a half 3.25% so I think we're going to start to see a lot of the esaw effect of of cash moving out of money market funds and into other places you know S&P 500 even you know risk assets uh other other equities crypto like there there is there is going to be a m massive change in general and so I think there's like a lot of effects going on simultaneously I would add on the macro front the two other things that the Federal Reserve watches is there it's inflation and unemployment the unemployment rate is starting to tick back up and the uh inflation we got a really weak uh really cold CPI print um within the last week as well so both of those things sort of give cloud cover for rate cuts the F

yeah I mean it's 92% 95% chance of a rate cut in September and and some of the Boomer macro people are like next move could be a hike in your toes it's like dude it's like the like the Japanese soldiers who are like hiding in caves 30 30 years after the war ends like we're good like we made it War's over did you see someone tweeted that out about crypto this week it was like it was like yeah it was actually pretty funny it was has a failed AI startup so like yeah I said I I uh yeah I saw I thought that was I mean that's just a funny that's a funny thing to tweet but

um but yeah I I agree with you I think it's um do you guys buy into the whole I mean it's uh there's actually a lot of good data to around this but just how how Federal Reserve chairman um or women think about rate hikes or Cuts or just changing monetary policy at all during um when we're close to an election like where do you guys fall on that because there's kind of two buckets right it's like the data says they don't change it and then everyone's like come on obviously they change it so right do you guys think well a 25 point cut a month before the election is not going to change the trajectory of what's going to happen I mean look the other the other way to think about it too is like okay it happens in September what if it

happens in November or December after the election both decision and and nothing happens before both decisions are highly political like you you're you're kind of like political on one end and political on the back end like it's politics either way Trump is saying he's going to keep Powell as the chair though so like ostensibly there's no like job saving or ending decision that he can make I don't think it makes any sense to install a new person as the chair uh like they've seen the entire cycle of inflation and rate hiking like let them do a good job cutting and then switch the Personnel like they're halfway through the job of what looks like we're going into maybe a

mild recession but they need to be on top of that and you can't have like Personnel switches in the middle of that yeah the the one part you know to that last point on like recession not recession mild not mild um I don't know if we're moving into a full-blown recession or if the data is finally catching up to the reality which is which is um you know the unemployment rate economic picture totally totally but like okay so so the recession I think obviously your stock market is high that's you know as we talked about the the max 7 this S&P 493 is lagging a lot of that is um you know growth concerns uh interest the

cost of money cost of doing business is increased um the uh you know payroll uh and unemployment rate every single unemployment reading has been revised downward over the last six months the there's whatever the percentage is I think it's in the 25 to 35% % of all new jobs created uh are government jobs and so I think you know for the private sector and and basically the economy uh as opposed to the the public sector and the government has been in a mild recession for a long time and like the last year and people have felt that across the board and that's one of the reasons why you're starting to see you know the data in the election polls and so I I think it's more of the data is

catching up to the reality less we're starting to like Teeter over the edge of something bigger I think that's right I think it's just going to freak people out when unemployment is like four and a half percent but it gives them the credit to be able to cut and maybe cut deeper yeah also four and a half percent is still pretty historically low for unemployment it's not people used to say economists used to estimate that that was like the actual zero for unemployment because there's always going to be some percentage of the population that doesn't want to work yeah yes but like unemployment rate if you look at it over time it trends it's like a it's like a momentum stock like it doesn't hit you know it doesn't go from three and a half to 4% where it

is today and then stop it it kind of goes up and it takes timeing down and like usually it's like pretty hard to bring down once it starts going up so maybe the unemployment rate today the real one to Michael's point is like four and a half or 5% but that means they need to cut rates pretty aggressively and maybe it's 25 basis points a quarter but once they do the first few height or the first few cuts and there's no new inflation I think they're going to have to be like all right where are we actually where is the neutral rate where is the unemployment rate like sure the stock market's an alltime high but like one interesting thing I read this year is Larry Finks uh he does like an annual letter and his old like look

like maybe the jobs come back maybe they don't you know we can only control the employment picture to a certain extent but what we can control is the US Stock Market and making sure that everyone is wealthy and the assets that we have you know are still the you know the the globally sought after market New York Stock Exchange NASDAQ Etc um and so his whole thing is like higher asset prices are good like we shouldn't view these as something bad and like you know compare that to Joe Biden who's like I'm not a stock market president I think like a lot of the economic rhetoric from devaluing the dollar from being Tech forward is Pro Stock Market um and I think that will save certain people think it saves crypto I think it just

makes the case that much more strong I think for some Industries like SAS there there like lower interest rates will help them but I think there's still questions around like how many more Marketplace SAS companies do we need how many more you know BB SAS products do we need like some of these industries it's like coal mining it's just like the end of the road and and I don't think SAS is over by any extent but like probably a lot smaller than it was in the 2010s yeah um and I think that there's also there's also the effect of so um one thing I was thinking about yesterday um we're at pretty low tax receipts uh and a lot of the reasons why are having

to do with lack of um facilitation of growth I would say or facilitation of Industry particularly m&a and one of the big things so let's say you know figma was able to be bought by Adobe by for $2 billion is actually 23 when all said and done it means the us government's taking on average 25% of that the California government you know is taking another 10% of that and so if you clear a path for m&a and you start to charge those markets again you can actually have real tax receipts I mean4 and a half billion dollars from one transaction on one given Year and that and then there's hundreds of them there's like that that I think also is another Boon to the to

the government and tax receipts um you're also stimulating the economy and lowering I mean Trump has said he's going to come out and lower corporate taxes and um I I think that you you're going to start to see you know asset prices inflate because you're going to lower corporate taxes or keep them at the same level you're going to have higher tax receipts because you're going to invigorate the the transaction of these businesses which you know has basically been stopped for the last four years and so I think this is kind of setting up for a lot of opportunity not just in assets but also in what is the government able to put that money into and where whereas they haven't been previously been able to collect it yeah there's a little bit of a rotation going

on over in stock market Land by the way to small caps um so like large caps like the mag 7 has been trouncing everything for a very long time and there's a little bit of a like that's the stock market rotation right now the the Trump trade is a rotation into smaller caps I also am I mean I'd be curious what you guys think about I know you know Vance you're just talking B2B SAS um I've always been a little bit of a skeptic about how much SAS we really need especially someone who pays for a lot of B2B SAS but the uh the other thing uh is the AI sort of trend or uh you know depending on how you want to describe a little bit of a bubble right like there's an enormous amount of VC funding going towards that Nvidia I'm not sure if it is now I think it's sold

off a little bit from the top but at one point it was the most valuable company on Earth I mean how much do you have how much do you guys see um and and I'm I guess last thing there I'm starting to hear people call for like hey we've invested you know hundred billion dollar of capex into AI like what's the requisite Revenue that we' need to see there and I think people are s of saying H we don't really know what the model is going to be here yet like I don't know if we can just charge everyone $20 subscriptions to chat PT so where do you get like what's your most recent thinking on AI and where we are in that kind of hype cycle I mean it's funny that the same infrastructure versus app I would say complaining is playing out in traditional Tech as it is in

crypto and I think like the left and right of B Cur take is just like look infrastructure is super valuable if it's infrastructure for the AI boom or if it's infrastructure money like Bitcoin and eath like infrastructure is valuable um and so like I'm like I kind of see putting the crypto complaints in the same light as the traditional Tech complaints kind of makes you just lowers your blood pressure around the whole idea of like man is infrastructure so overvalued I don't think that the case I do think it is the case that like look for all the trillions of dollars of value created 90% of the revenue you know for all the trillions of dollars of market cap that have been created in AI which is mostly in Nvidia most of the revenue probably 90% of it is being

generated by open AI at the moment so like you know you got three trillion or whatever whatever Nvidia is two trillion or three trillion of value and you got four billion of Revenue that's attributable to that will that always be the case no but I think you know the revenue so far is small that doesn't mean the infrastructure is bad or you should be bearish that infrastructure what I've personally noticed is that I use perplexity probably once once a week twice a week three times a week for like deep focused research and half the time it's wrong but like it helps me but like I've canceled chat GPT like these these AI apps kind of have this High burnout rate if it's not super contextual and targeted so I've heard the take that

open AI is the AOL online of of uh AI you know app startups I think that could be right in the fullness of time and that that in and of itself would be devastating to the Venture case for you know AI app investment I i' actually take the other side of that just in be in the fact that if that was the case it would give way to the next Yahoo and then Google and so you'd have to assume that if it is the AOL example like there are others coming that take the take the lead and kind of supplant their their position as the lead and those will be funded by Venture firms and I I think you know there there's a article out of seoa capital

and I think it's named Stephen KH who who wrote an article called the $600 billion dollar problem this this is who I was referring to yeah yeah yeah exactly and and so uh everyone who is interested should go read it but basically it it says the infrastructure investment and he has some math um you know basically needs to pay back there needs to be four times as much revenue per year to pay back the infrastructure right and so where is that coming from and you've got you know hundreds of billions what will be trillions of dollars going into infrastructure for AI over the next you know whatever five seven 10 years and I totally agree it's the same thing that's happening with blockchains which is like where are the apps where's everything well okay the thing that we've spent the last five

years or the last I don't know four years since dym are working on is taking ethereum and bringing it down to the point of $1,000 a transaction to a penny a transaction like that is fundamental over the last four years AI is probably going to go through a similar thing where right now chbt costs 10 times the amount of compute power to process one equivalent Google search than Google search we'll probably see similar orders of magnitude Improvement which will enable new applications and make them more approachable and and and and um easily consumable because they're not as expensive to run and and so I think we're in this like this also happened in the 90s too and this is what everybody

is using as the mental model for how to think about this in the late 90s everybody started plowing billions of dollars in a Broadband buildout because you can't run you know Netflix over a dialup or AOL where it had to like like connecting you're online You've Got Mail like all that [ __ ] was how everybody connected to the internet back in the day and then 56k Broadband ethernet cable um and then T T1 T1 T3 lines were became the standard and now everybody has you know basically zero latency inter internet connectivity everywhere in the world I think that that similar buildout will happen but that's what people just had to invest in in the 2000 2001 2002 as the internet was crashing and so everybody said oh

this is over like this is dumb but that infrastructure buildout enabled the Resurgence of what will happen and so maybe we're kind of like Crest piece Crest piercing the first edge of the AI bubble where you're you're starting to see okay you know the application isn't there yet you know the the infrastructure buildout is still happening but like it's too much money and so maybe people start pulling back some of their investment but I think that you know that ultimately will lead to the enablement of AI because the investment now will have a payback period it's just like decades in the future and so you can't you can't line these things up perfectly because you need infrastructure before you can have the app yeah and on the whole apps vers

infrastructure Yano got called on he he went on um uh The Chopping Block and they were talking about this as well and I think one of the I was just listening to has talk about it with him and I think that people kind of incorrectly point at VCS and they're like hey why are you guys funding this stuff and it's like look you get like this is the way that I feel about that is the same reason people people incorrectly assume that like media has a lot of uh like leeway to produce whatever we want like actually Anatolia at the last permission list was like hey why aren't we talking about apps here why is there all this infrastructure talk it's like I'm trying my job is to go out there and see what people want to talk about and then present that to them like I don't

actually I could produce a whole conference about applications but it doesn't mean that anyone would watch it or come and then who's winning right and I sort I mean you guys know the craft of VC much better than me but it's kind of like all right in a sense like you your world of opportunity is the entrepreneurs that you guys see and have the opportunity to fund right so I think it's kind of a dumb critique to be like the C's are the problem here it's just like I agree there's just like this is where we are in the industry like we needed to build a whole bunch of infrastructure right um but the uh because I have also been calling for more apps so to defend my my worldview here is just that eventually at some point now that the block space is cheap

you know we do want these things because in my opinion the best way to win hearts and minds of people is to like make experiences that people actually love and that's going to do an enormous amount because all the stuff that we've been talking about about maybe there's a specific Market structure Bill and maybe there's some piece of legislation that Trump and JD Vance are going to push through honestly I would settle for just entrepreneurs not worrying about getting arrested in the US which is literally the concern right like that's that's the bar that I have personally like I just and so I think if we got that if if entrepreneurs weren't worried about living here anymore and if there were a couple apps that people had in their pocket that they were like married to like Tik Tok I think that does just so much for the industry we have

apps though like we got seven million monthly defi active users we've got uh probably 50 million monthly active users on chain games are starting to scale things like polym Market are breaking into the mainstream financial services are real stable coins are shout out for hiring Nate silver by the way to that was one of the most impressive hires I have we we are tracking we are tracking like we are not off track and like frankly all of the stupid ideas in 2017 that or most of them people thought were stupid you know like even nfts or defi or games like all of these things are coming true like it it just is taking a little bit so I think you can either myopically focus on like oh it's such a

bubble and blah blah blah it's like you're welcome to short um I don't know what the be case is but like you can knock yourself out I I think you're kind of missing the forest for the trees if that's your perspective but to be clear I don't think things like denta coin are going to be coming back the coin for dentists well but but also you just a little like history here the internet got started with cats on the internet and like Star Wars guy and and then infrastructure became so you know low cost that you were able to upload your own videos to YouTube you were able to like post your own blog it it like having your own website was something that cost you $9.99 a month or

even like $59.99 a month way back in the day but like you bring down the cost curve and you start to see like all the different ideas explode and that's where we're at in in crypto we have been over the last four years I think we're starting the same infrastructure buildout cycle in Ai and so it'll probably be a couple more years for us to be able to have an application where it's like boom like to your point Mike you know something is as big as Tik Tok okay well first off I don't think crypto is going to have a consumer application appeal in the same way that Tik Tok exists that's for the core internet but AI doesn't have an application like that as well like there there aren't you know the same levels of viral loops and feedback and mechan like chat gbt gets

[ __ ] wrong all the time perplexity same thing so like we're we're still so early days in all of these things I think it's just important to go back to politics is uh the internet is what has been driving growth look at the max 7even it's what's holding up our economy in so many different ways and if we you know snuffed that opportunity out in the mid90s late 90s I don't know where we would be as a country now but it probably wouldn't be in the place that we're at right now we wouldn't be able to be making the same decisions whe when it comes to social good you know communities how we're going to spend money how we're going to defend ourselves what you know what decisions we should be making we wouldn't because we'd be struck with not being able to

have an opportunity to make decisions and so I think that is the is the overarching point here is low regulation Pro inovation is how we have the opportunity to have these industries flourish in the future one last comment on like Market stuff Michael and I have a have a mutual friend that works at a big one of the big pod shops um and this week I I had a call with them and just talking about markets life whatever he's like dude this week I I I took all of my shorts off I just don't feel comfortable anymore this is the first uh the first day in almost three years where it felt like 2020 2020 .1 um and I think you see that with some of the rotation small caps and rotation you know in and out of

tech whatever but like it feels like this was the week where people said like okay what like Trump has a probably greater than 80% chance to win like what does that mean for the future and I think it's like just bullish it's bullish technology which is great because I don't know if the tech industry or the crypto industry could survive another four years of of Biden at least you know not with him at the top of the ticket who knows what kamala's yeah like who knows what Kamala thinks but um I'm glad that we're we're in a different place now I've got one more uh maybe to end on a more crypto Centric note here uh zerx Jim tweeted out this thing about uh blast this week that they changed their

handle from being an L2 to a full stack chain and I think uh it's unclear like a lot of people interpreted this as they're like you know cuz a lot of people like to say oh that l2s are going to leave ethereum and they're launching their own chain I think it's less clear that that's actually happening and more that they're going to vertically integrate parts of their ecosystem like have like a native wallet and things like that and I would just be curious um we talked a little while ago about the maybe stratifying world of l2s where you've got the Front Runners in terms of you know volume and activity and tvl like the arbitrum and the optimism of the world and then you've got some of these new entrance which are choosing different vectors to innovate on so blast I think actually did a really good

job in innovating on distribution like they had a pretty novel Mech like native yield and they attracted a bunch of TBL and now it looks like they're going to have like a more like owning the full stack of a user once they get on to blast which I think is pretty interesting Mega eth is also doing something around this right they're basically you know cranking the you know if if inheriting e security allows you to be somewhat centralized they're just cranking that [ __ ] up to 11 and making a really fast cheap sequencer so I would love to get your guys updated thoughts on just like l2s in general do you have you do you see it barbell between like the early winners with network effects and some of these new entrance who are innovating on distribution and or on innovating and then if so who do you

think is innovating in an interesting way I think the net effects of these l2s um are going to be less strong over time just give interop and you know the proliferation of apps across chains is going to be default multi-chain um I think the winner here is still um even in the sense that like sure mantle becomes I don't even know what an L1 versus an L2 whatever but like all of their tvl all of their activity all of their pairs are denominated Neath and like over the long long term we've talked about this ad nauseum like even salana is now you know they're they're funding l2s like you cannot force people to stay on your chain forever your your

only choice is to use your money use your base currency as money proliferate across the l2s and drive Network effects and valuation from the use of that currency as money and so like will op be the token that all the l3s are denominated in I don't know about that I I just like it's just like and we've studied salana and it's defi ecosystem like it's really hard to bootstrap your native asset as money um and so like again I think a version of the world where there's a thousand l2s and they all use eth as currency and sure they cannibalize some fees that's like part of the long-term plan and everyone will face that at some point no matter what speed cost

throughput your chain is um the prognosis on l2s I don't know I don't know if they're actually eth beta it seems like the unlocks that people keep trying to stand in front of keep blowing them up so I just don't I I don't think buying a basket of elt is the same thing as owning eth or you know Bitcoin or even salana in the case where they have a lot of l2s I I think there's an interesting analogy with like traditional technology as well and just as like a little a little history um so the the most successful Enterprise platform I would probably say is Salesforce just the ability that they've been able to to get the lockin value that they've had with all their customers like they have just built this

amazing platform it's like their API platform so much so that like truly their software looks like it was built in the 90s still from a ux perspective um everybody uses it everybody loves it and and uh and dreamforce in San Francisco here is like one of the it's like a week where the whole city kind of like has to shut down because there's so many so many damn people around um but how many people go to dream Force like how big is that tens of thousands wow It it's crazy um but I I would say so in 2012 2013 when I was at Dropbox Dropbox was like oh we're going to build a platform too like we're going to get all these apps to build on top of our platform and it's going to be great and they're going use Dropbox storage they're going to be drop box customers

for life and it guess what didn't work and there's a lot of reasons why drop box also had other issues but uh the the I I think it's a similar process where everyone's like oh oh like we're we're gonna do that too the platform twio is we're the platform and like when okay twio twio used to say uh every The Tam is every company that has cogs is our is our Tam We Will We Will Serve services to every company that is paying for services it's like okay uh but the broader point is everybody looks at the best in class and

they're like oh we can just do the same thing we can run the same Playbook and in reality you can't and and there's only one best in class for a reason and they've been able to get there and I think that that's a lot of what is happening with this whole like oh the L2 is becoming the L1 and therefore like it's going to disintermediate the L1 and be full stacked in reality it doesn't understand how it became an L2 in the first place which is off the back of the L1 and I I think that sort of like misunderstanding is and maybe someone will be able to Traverse it but it you either have to be full stack from the from the start and be able to build a community frankly like Solana has been able to do to date or or you have to

recognize your position in the infrastructure stack and recognize that you're built on top of eth and you're not probably not going to be able to do all the things that eth can do and all the other ecosystem participants do you're just a part of it you're not the whole thing and so I mean that's broadly how I would describe it that's a very very good analogy I like that and like the the alternative I think the other path is you become a hyp specific app chain focus on one thing and you do that one thing well that's probably like the you play this out like long enough it's like Dropbox kind of went back to being like a like a photo sharing file sharing app in its core um maybe that's like the forecaster chain

maybe that's like the you know uh gaming chain but like again like you need to bootstrap your tvl and value from somewhere um and you know like a lot of it's just going to be the base quency so again I I think like the over bearishness on infrastructure kind of conflates like maybe like bad infrastructure projects that have launched with like the fact that infrastructure is the most valuable category in in crypto also like you have to it's better to um like I know you guys both like launching a bunch of tokens actually does end up it's like free market competition right to figure out what the best solution is otherwise you end up with like a

centrally planned type solution like the bitcoiners kind of did this with lightning right like I don't know my my sense is that everyone kind of coalesced around this like state sponsored intellectually you know uh endowed solution and I still don't really hear people say yeah this just doesn't really work um so I don't know I think that uh maybe what some people react to a little bit is how chaotic it feels like with all these different solutions but at the end of the day a couple of these things are going to win out and it's probably better to have free market competition than state sponsored yeah I mean look it's like same thing as as ECC you want less side events okay have a conference with a bunch of shitty side events people will no longer throw them um like

welcome to open source free market capital like this is this is what we're doing this has always been the plan we should do a I I I guess to end on ECC shout out to uh uh I I didn't actually go but uh be chain I heard uh absolutely murdered it on the side events in community also heard great things about manad and I I did go to modular Summit as well for Celestia they did a really good job uh pulling people out so maybe other people had um different interpretations of like what the best ones were but I thought yeah bar chain manad Celestia did a good job at ECC this year I didn't see Igan Lair I hardly saw IG they had a huge Presence at eth Denver and I didn't see much of them but I think they're shipping I think they're

shipping too it's actually bullish I think it's super bullish Ian Lair actually um so all right fellas I think that's just about it anything else on your guys end no enjoy the day all right fun one guys later see next week see you hey everyone want to give a final shout out to this episode's title sponsor say now there are a whole bunch of really exciting reasons to be building on say V2 outside of just parallelization I want you to head over to say. IO to looking into building on their public devet again click the link at the bottom of this episode and head over to say. start building something today